From Freud's The Uncanny (1919)

Below are the passages from Freud's "The Uncanny" we discussed in class relating to Heart of Darkness.  Consider how images of Africa, the natives, and Kurtz himself play into "the uncanny," which is both alien and familiar (hauntingly so) to Marlowe.  This reading suggests that the voyage is less into physical than mental "darkness," uncovering a past which has been sublimated beneath the spires of culture and British civilization.  And yet, it lurks there still...

"However, after considering the manifest motivation behind the figure of the double, we have to own that none of this helps us understand the extraordinary degree of uncanniness that attaches to it, and we may add, drawing upon our knowledge of pathological mental processes, that none of this content could explain the defensive urge that ejects it from the ego as something alien.  Its uncanny quality can surely derive only from the fact that the double is a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development, a phase that we have surmounted, in which it admittedly had a more benign significance.  The double has become an object of terror, just as the gods become demons after the collapse of their cult…this phase did not pass without leaving behind in us residual traces that can still make themselves felt, and that everything we known find ‘uncanny’ meets the criterion that is linked with these remnants of animistic mental activity…”